Mark Reviews Movies: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (2022)

All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 27, 2022

It is strange that it has taken almost a hundred years for an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's influential novel to be made by its native country, but here, quite belatedly, is co-writer/director Edward Berger's All Quiet on the Western Front. The story is of the Great War, mostly about the teenagers, young men, and the desperate of Germany driven into combat by patriotic fervor or financial necessity. This war inevitably grinds them up, as they're ordered to hold trenches under heavy and devastating artillery fire, make useless charges across no man's land, and face off against tanks, planes, and gas attacks with limited arms and little knowledge about how to defend against a newly industrialized form of warfare.

The film is mostly a horror show of soldiers falling mid-stride, young men being demolished by explosions, and one screaming man being crushed by a tank. Beneath that part, there's the constant dread—of fearing that a bullet, a shell, or flames could come from any direction—turning into something even more horrifying: accepting that violent end, simply because it is inevitable under these hopeless circumstances. Somewhere deeper than that, of course, is Remarque's point that all wars—and this one, in which he served, in particular—take an immeasurable toll on the people who fight them and on human kind's sense of humanity in general.

Berger's most impressive distillation of that deeper idea comes right at the start of his film. It begins in the spring of 1917 with images that will become common as the rest of the story unfolds. A young German soldier is barricaded in the trenches with his comrades, and then comes the order to push forward, through the ruins of nature that once was and the corpses of other soldiers who had done the same.

The camera follows one soldier, who makes a courageous rush through a hail of bullets and explosions. Nonetheless, he is killed. His body is later found. His boots are pulled from his feet and tossed into an amassing pile. His uniform is stripped from his corpse and put into a large satchel with dozens of others.

During a haunting montage, the uniform becomes more important than the man who wore it, as the clothes are driven from the front, brought to some laundry facility and cleaned, stitched up by one of a team of seamstresses, and shipped off again to a small town. There, 17-year-old Paul Bäumer (Felix Krammerer), along with what seems to be his entire class in school, enlists in the Army to fight for his country. When he receives his uniform, he notices it already has a nametag, which the recruiting officer notes must be a mistake, before tearing its former owner's name to be again forgotten on the floor.

The rest of the story (adapted by Berger, Lesley Paterson, and Ian Stokell) should be known, whether or not one has read the novel or seen its most famous adaptation, the 1930 American film. Remarque's tale has become a model for war stories that focus, not on strategy or noteworthy heroes or some sense of glory, but on ordinary lives upended, ideals destroyed, and any thoughts of bravery, admiration, and victory quashed by the realities of combat. Its impact on our collective understanding of war and its costs is incalculable.

Meanwhile, Berger's adaptation begins with a strong visual and narrative representation of that, especially in presenting war as an economic engine revolving around a de-humanizing form of recycling. From there, the film does exactly what it needs to do—no more and no less—and is gruesomely effective in communicating the visceral terror of this chapter in history.

Paul is joined and, one-by-one, left by a series of comrades, from those classmates, whose bright faces sing as they march toward the trucks that will transport them to the front lines, to Kat (Albrecht Schuch), a man with a wife at home (Paul becomes close because he can read her letters to the husband), who has difficulty imagining some domestic future beyond the war. Some of those friends are killed on-screen, such as a naïve and bespectacled student who only realizes he wants to be at home during a shelling attack. Others simply disappear, with a fellow soldier offering news of their deaths and maybe a memento that recalls they lived in the first place.

Our protagonist does and witnesses a lot—from constant charges to gain ground that hasn't been won or lost in a long time, to stabbing an enemy soldier and having to live with his agonizing death, to seeing a friend surrender and be burned alive by a flamethrower. There's nothing approaching glory here, only the cold and cruel fact of trying to survive, such as when Paul and his comrades shoot French soldiers in the mess of their trench and proceed to devour whatever food they can grab.

Meanwhile, some powers-that-be are in a fight of their own. Daniel Brühl plays a politician working to arrange a ceasefire with his French counterparts, and Devid Striesow portrays the field marshal near the front, secluded in a lavish, secure manor and complaining about the possibility of the war coming to an end. The first gives a race-against-the-clock element to the plot that feels manipulative, and the other tries to put a face on the apathetic higher-ups.

Here, though, the machine of war, chomping and crunching the bodies and minds of ordinary men, is so overwhelming a villain that no human looks nearly as awful. Despite those shortcomings and some underutilized philosophical potential, All Quiet on the Western Front is an ambitiously mounted production, filled with horrific sights and suggesting even more terrifying notions—about war as an industry and how death might be a relief compared to no longer feeling human.

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